Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee

PREFACE

The Portent

In October 1859, Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee,* commanding the Second U.S. Cavalry, in Texas, was home on leave, laboring to untangle the affairs of his late father-in-law’s estate. Despite a brilliant military career—many thought him the most capable officer in the U.S. Army—he was a disappointed man. Nobody understood better than Lee how slowly promotion came in this tiny army, or knew more exactly how many officers were ahead of him in the all-important ranking of seniority and stood between him and the seemingly unreachable step of being made a permanent full colonel. He did not suppose, given his age, which was fifty-two, that he would ever wear a brigadier general’s single star, still less that fame and military glory awaited him, and although he was not the complaining type, he often expressed regret that he had chosen the army as a career. An engineer of considerable ability—he was credited with making the mighty Mississippi navigable, which among other great benefits turned the sleepy town of Saint Louis into a thriving river port—he could have made his fortune had he resigned from the army to become a civil engineer. Instead, he commanded a cavalry regiment hunting renegade Indians in a dusty corner of the Texas frontier, and not very successfully at that, and was now home, in his wife’s mansion across the Potomac from Washington, methodically uncovering the debts and the problems of her father’s estate, which seemed likely to plunge the Lees even further into land-poor misery. Indeed, the shamefully run-down state of the Arlington mansion, the discontent of the slaves he and his wife had inherited, and the long neglect of his father-in-law’s plantations made it seem only too likely that Lee might have to resign his commission and spend his life as an impoverished country gentleman, trying to put things right for the sake of his wife and children.

He could not have guessed that an event less than seventy miles away was to make him famous—and go far toward bringing about what Lee most feared: the division of his country over the smoldering issues of slavery and states’ rights.

Harpers Ferry, Sunday, October 16, 1859

Shortly after eight o’clock at night, having completed his preparations and his prayers, a broad-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes, his full white beard bristling like that of Moses, the old man led eighteen of his followers, two of them his own sons, down a narrow, rutted, muddy country road toward Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They marched silently in twos behind him as he drove a heavily loaded wagon pulled by one horse.

The members of his army had assembled there during the summer and early autumn, hiding away from possibly inquisitive neighbors and learning how to handle their weapons. John Brown had shipped to the farm a formidable arsenal: 198 Sharps rifles, 200 Maynard revolvers, 31,000 percussion caps, an ample supply of gunpowder, and 950 pikes. The pikes Brown had ordered from a blacksmith in Connecticut two years earlier—made to his own design at a dollar apiece, they consisted of a double-edged blade about ten inches long, sharpened at both edges, shaped rather like a large dirk or a broad dagger, and intended to be attached to a six-foot ash pole, a weapon that Brown thought might be more effective and terrifying in the hands of liberated slaves than firearms, with which they were unlikely to be familiar.

Brown’s reputation as the apostle of the sword of Gideon had been made, for better or for worse, in the widespread guerrilla warfare and anarchy of bleeding Kansas, where pro-slavery freebooters from Missouri clashed repeatedly with Free Soilers, settlers who were vigorously opposed to the extension of slavery into the territory. Southerners were equally determined to prevent a free state on the border of Missouri, which might render this species of property—a current euphemism for slaves—insecure. Violence was widespread and took many forms, from assassination, arson, lynching, skirmishes, and bushwhacking to small battles complete with artillery.

Brown had been responsible for the murder of five pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek in revenge for the sacking of the antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas—they had been dragged from their homes in the middle of the night and butchered with broadswords. Brown led the killers, who included two of his sons, and may have given the coup de grâce to one of the victims.

For three years, from 1855 through 1858, a group of Free Soilers under the command of Captain Brown (or Osawatomie Brown, as he was called after his heavily fortified Free Soil settlement) fought pitched battles against Border Ruffians (as the pro-slavery forces were known by their enemies), in one of which his son Frederick was killed. Brown achieved fame bordering on idolatry among abolitionists in the North for his exploits as a guerrilla fighter in Kansas, culminating in a daring raid during the course of which he liberated eleven slaves from their masters in Missouri and, evading pursuit despite a price on his head, transported them all the way to freedom across the border in Canada in midwinter.

John Brown was a man of extraordinary courage and persistence, with a grandiose vision and a remarkable gift for organization. Widowed and remarried, he was the father of twenty children by his two wives; a commanding, often intimidating presence even to his enemies; as much at ease in the elegant drawing rooms of the wealthy New England and New York City abolitionists who supported him as he was in the saddle, armed to the teeth, on the plains of Kansas. He was at once a throwback to the undiluted Calvinism and Puritanism of the first New England settlers and far ahead of his time—however opposed they might be to slavery, most abolitionists still shied away from social equality with blacks, but Brown had built his home in New Elba, New York, close to Lake Placid, among freed blacks who ate at the same table as the Browns, and whom he punctiliously addressed as Mr. or Mrs. When he redrafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution for the benefit of his followers, he included not only racial equality, a revolutionary idea at the time, but what we would now call gender equality, giving women full rights and the vote, promising secure equal rights, privileges, & justice to all; Irrespective of Sex, or Nation. Brave, unshaken by doubt, willing to shed blood unflinchingly and to die for his cause if necessary, Brown was the perfect man to light the tinder of civil war in America, which was just what he intended to do.

The object of his raid was the U.S. Armory at Harpers Ferry, where 10,000 military rifles a year were manufactured and over 100,000 were stored. Its capture was certain to create a nationwide sensation, and panic in the South; but although Brown was a meticulous planner, his intentions after he captured the armory were uncharacteristically vague. He hoped the act itself would encourage slaves to join his cause, and intended to arm them with rifles if they came in large enough numbers; certainly his intention, once they were armed, was to lead them into the Blue Ridge Mountains, from which they could descend from time to time in larger and larger numbers to liberate more slaves: reenacting the raid into Missouri on a grander and growing scale. When he struck, Brown wrote, The bees will begin to swarm.

Careful as his preparations had been, Brown had perhaps waited too long before striking, with the result that his usual energy and decisiveness in action seem to have deserted him just when they were most needed. Unlikely as it may seem, he may have come to believe it would be sufficient to stand at Armageddon and . . . battle for the Lord, and the rest would follow. If so, he was underestimating the anger his raid would cause among the 2,500 people who lived in or near Harpers Ferry, or the alarm it would create in Washington, D.C., less than seventy miles away as the crow flies.

His first moves were sensible enough, given the small number of his force and the sprawling size of the armory. Two of his men cut the telegraph wires, while others secured the bridges over the Potomac and the Shenandoah rivers—Harpers Ferry was on a narrow peninsula, where the rivers joined, and not unlike an island—thus virtually isolating the town. Brown took prisoner the lone night watchman at the armory in the brick fire-engine house, a solid structure that he made his command post, then sent several of his men off into the night to liberate as many slaves as they could from nearby farms and bring their owners in as hostages. The western part of Virginia was not plantation country with large numbers of field slaves, but Brown had done his homework—one of his men had been living in Harpers Ferry for over a year, spying out the ground, and even fell in love with a local girl who had borne him a son.

Brown was particularly determined to capture Colonel Lewis W. Washington, a local gentleman farmer and slave owner on a small scale, the great-grandnephew of President Washington, and to have the ceremonial sword that Frederick the Great had presented to George Washington placed in the hands of one of his black followers as a symbol of racial justice. Colonel Washington (his rank was an honorary one) was removed in the middle of the night from his rather modest home, Beall-Air, about five miles from Harpers Ferry, and delivered to Brown in his own carriage, along with a pair of pistols that Lafayette had given George Washington, the sword from Frederick the Great, and three somewhat puzzled slaves.

More slaves were soon brought in, and armed with pikes to guard their former owners in the engine house—most either accepted these weapons reluctantly or refused to touch them. Brown now had thirty-five hostages and possession of the armory, but the slave uprising on which he was counting did not take place, and during the night, one by one, things started to go wrong.

The first problem arose when the night watchman’s relief arrived at his post on the Potomac bridge and found it held by armed strangers. He panicked; took a wild punch at Oliver Brown, one of Brown’s sons; then ran, at which point one of Oliver’s companions shot at him, sending his hat flying and grazing his skull. The night watchman, bleeding profusely, rushed into the Galt House, a saloon opposite the hotel and railway station, and raised the alarm, although the sound of a shot in the middle of the night in a peaceful backwater like Harpers Ferry was by itself enough to arouse the curiosity of those who heard it. Then, at 1:25 a.m., the eastbound Baltimore and Ohio train from Wheeling to Baltimore arrived to encounter the bridge blocked by armed men.

The arrival of the train can hardly have come as a surprise to Brown, since all he had to do was consult a Baltimore and Ohio schedule, but it should have been a signal to him to gather up his hostages, their slaves, and as many rifles as he could pack into the wagon, and get out of town and into the hills with his followers while he could. Given his actions over the next few hours, it is hard not to conclude that somewhere in the back of his mind he had already guessed the effect that a courageous last stand and martyrdom would have on public opinion in the North.

In the meantime, the engineer and the baggage master of the train went forward to see what the problem was on the bridge, and were fired on. Sensibly, they returned and backed the train out of range. The shots attracted the attention of the Harpers Ferry station baggage master, Hayward Shepherd, a freed black man well liked and respected by everybody in town, who went toward the bridge to see what was happening, was told to halt, and was then shot in the back and mortally wounded as he turned away. The irony of the fact that the first victim of the raid was a freed black man holding a responsible job would have been painful news to John Brown, who was, however, too far away from the bridge to know about it.

The shot, and Shepherd’s cries of pain, woke Dr. John D. Starry, who lived nearby. He ran to where Shepherd lay to see if he could help the wounded man. Realizing immediately that Shepherd was beyond anything he could do for him, Dr. Starry, an uncommonly courageous man, stayed to give what comfort to Shepherd he could; then, after observing what was going on in town, he went home, saddled his horse, and began to ride around Harpers Ferry in the spirit of Paul Revere, alerting people to the raid on the armory. He had the presence of mind to send a messenger off to summon the nearest militia, the Jefferson Guard, from Charles Town, the country seat, about eight miles away; he had the church bells rung; and he warned the gathering, puzzled citizens of Harpers Ferry that they had better arm themselves. The bees were beginning to swarm just as John Brown had predicted, but they were not the ones he had in mind.

In the meantime, the train to Baltimore was stuck, since the men holding the bridge refused to let it pass, although they allowed the passengers to walk back and forth. At three in the morning, Brown at last sent word that it could proceed, but the conductor, Phelps, decided it was safer to wait until daybreak before starting. Then Phelps stopped the train at Monocacy, twenty-one miles away, the first stop down the line to the east of Harpers Ferry, to send a telegraph informing W. P. Smith, the B&O’s master of transportation in Baltimore, of what had happened. Phelps reported that his train had been fired on, that a B&O employee had been shot, and that at least 150 insurrectionists who had come to free the slaves were holding both bridges at Harpers Ferry and had told him they would fire on any further train that attempted to cross.

Smith was surprised and, it is possible to guess, irritated by Phelps’s message. He telegraphed back, Your dispatch is evidently exaggerated and written under excitement. Why should our trains be stopped by Abolitionists? From farther down the line at Elicott’s Mills, Phelps replied indignantly that he had not exaggerated, or even made it half as bad as it is, but by this time the exchange of messages had already reached the desk of John W. Garrett, the president of the Baltimore and Ohio, and he at once took them more seriously than W. P. Smith. Garrett telegraphed the president of the United States, as well as the governor of Virginia and the commander of the Maryland Volunteers, that an insurrection was in progress . . . in which free negroes and whites were engaged.

In the mid-nineteenth century presidents were by no means as insulated from the communications of ordinary citizens as they are today, and not a few presidents still opened their own mail and read their own telegrams. At the same time, the president of a major railroad was a person of considerable importance, so it is not surprising that Garrett’s message to President James Buchanan reached him without delay early in the morning on October 17 or that he acted on it immediately.

Buchanan was not nicknamed Old Public Functionary for nothing: he was an American version of The Vicar of Bray. A Pennsylvania Democrat, he had been a congressman, a senator, U.S. minister to Russia, U.S. minister plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James’s, and secretary of state, before winning the presidency in 1856. His service abroad as a diplomat had spared him some of the virulent and passionate political quarrels on the subject of slavery, and he was in any case a doughboy (a term of contempt for northerners who were sympathetic to the demands of the slave states), and determined to seek a compromise between southern slave owners and northern abolitionists. Moderation of course gained him no friends on either side of the issue. The only bachelor to have occupied the White House so far, he had lived for fifteen years before his election to the presidency with Senator William Rufus King of Alabama, and it is possible that Buchanan’s views on slavery were influenced by his friendship with King—he remarked in his third annual message to Congress that slaves were treated with kindness and humanity. . . . Both the philanthropy and the self-interest of the master have combined to produce this humane result, a rosy view of the institution of slavery that was common enough in Alabama, but unusual in Buchanan’s native Pennsylvania.

Buchanan recognized a crisis when it presented itself, however, and rapidly set in motion as many troops as possible: detachments of regular army infantry and artillery from Fort Monroe, Virginia, and a company of U.S. Marines from the Navy Yard under the command of Lieutenant Israel Green, the only troops available in Washington, were ordered to proceed by train at once to Baltimore and from there to Harpers Ferry, while uniformed companies of the Virginia and Maryland militias (the Hamtramck Guards, the Shepherdstown troop, the Jefferson Guards) had already begun to move into Harpers Ferry and were exchanging fire with John Brown’s outnumbered followers, along with a sizable number of armed and angry citizens and volunteers, or vigilantes.

Buchanan’s secretary of war, John B. Floyd, was not efficient, nor would he prove to be loyal—after Harpers Ferry he would be suspected of shipping large numbers of weapons from Federal arsenals in the North to those in the South in anticipation of secession; and in 1862, as a Confederate general, he would abandon his post at Fort Donelson shortly before Grant besieged and took it, for fear he might be tried for treason if he was captured—but he had the good sense to realize that somebody needed to be in command of all these forces converging on Harpers Ferry, and that the right man for the job was at his home in Arlington, just across the Potomac River from Washington.

Robert E. Lee and his wife had inherited the imposing white-pillared mansion that is now the centerpiece of Arlington National Cemetery in 1857 from her father, George Washington Parke Custis, the stepgrandson and adopted son of George Washington. The Arlington property alone comprised 1,100 acres, with a slave population of sixty-three, while two other plantations in Virginia brought the total number of Custis slaves to nearly 200. Custis’s management of his plantations, never his first interest—even a sympathetic fellow southerner described him as a negligent farmer and an easy-going master—had further slackened with age and infirmity. The Arlington mansion, while it was something of a museum of George Washington’s possessions (including the bed he died in), was leaking and in need of major, expensive repairs; the plantations were poorly farmed; and the slaves, who had been given to understand that they would be freed on Custis’s death, found instead that their release was contingent on the many other poorly drafted obligations in his will, which looked as if it might drag itself through the courts for years, keeping them in bondage indefinitely.

That this did not make for a happy or willing workforce was only one of the many problems that faced Lee, who, much against his own desire, had taken leave after leave from his post as commander of the recently formed Second U.S. Cavalry at Camp Cooper, Texas, a rough frontier outpost on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, to devote himself to bringing some kind of order to his father-in-law’s estate. Much as Lee might wish he were back in Texas with his troopers chasing bands of Comanche marauders on the frontier, his sense of obligation and duty to his family kept him at Arlington, trying to get a little work done and to mend up some things, as he wrote to one of his sons, adding, I succeed very badly.

If so, it was one of the few examples of failure in the life of Robert E. Lee. One of the rare cadets to have been graduated from the U.S. Military Academy with no demerits, he had joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which in those days got the best and the brightest of cadets, and undertook successfully some of the largest and most difficult public projects of his time, including a safe deepwater channel on the Mississippi that opened up Saint Louis to shipping and caused the mayor of that city to hail him grandly as the man who brought the Father of the Waters under control. His service in the Mexican War was at once heroic and of vital importance; his gallantry won him universal admiration, as well as the confidence and friendship of General Winfield Scott, who singled Lee out for special praise to Congress.

Lee was later appointed superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy; his leadership at West Point won him the confidence and praise of both the cadets and the War Department, as well as giving him an opportunity to take advantage of its library and study in exhaustive detail the campaigns of Napoleon—a scholarly interest that would pay dividends in the most unexpected way only seven years later when he would become celebrated as the greatest tactician in American military history, as well as a foe without hate, a friend without treachery, a soldier without cruelty, a victor without oppression . . . a Caesar, without his ambition, Frederick, without his tyranny, Napoleon without his selfishness, and Washington, without his reward.

Lee was happy enough to give up the Corps of Engineers for active soldiering, and Jefferson Davis, secretary of war (and future president of the Confederacy), was eager to have him as second in command of the newly formed Second Cavalry, for which Davis had long petitioned Congress to reinforce the American military presence on the frontier. For the next six years Lee’s military service was to be of the hardest kind, in places where there was nothing much except lonely space to attract Indians . . . or to induce them to remain, and from which he wrote to his wife on July 4, 1856, with a burst of sincere patriotism: the sun was fiery hot. The atmosphere like the blast from a hot-air furnace, the water salt; still my feelings for my country were as ardent, my faith in her future as true, and my hopes for her advancement as unabated, as if called forth under more propitious circumstances. Lee eventually rose to succeed Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, the future Confederate general who would die of his wound at Shiloh, as commander of the Second Cavalry, and it was from his duties as its commanding officer that he had taken leave to see to the interminable problems of his father-in-law’s estate.

Secretary of War Floyd returned from the White House to his office to put in motion the forces that he and President Buchanan had decided to send to Harpers Ferry, and to summon Colonel Lee to the War Department at once. He scrawled a quick note to Colonel Drinkard, chief clerk of the War Department, to write out an order to Lee, which read: Brvt. Co. R. E. Lee, Lt. Col. 2nd cavalry is assigned to duty according to his Brvt rank & will repair to Harper’s Ferry & take command of the troops ordered to that place. He will direct all the troops from Ft. Monroe to continue their route to that place, Harper’s Ferry. [signed] J. B. Floyd, Secretary of War. Finding First Lieutenant J. E. B. (Jeb) Stuart of the First Cavalry in his waiting room, and since Stuart was actually staying with the Lees at Arlington, Floyd gave him the sealed envelope and asked him to deliver it personally to Lee. Stuart had been a cadet at West Point when Lee became superintendent, and was a close friend of one of Lee’s sons, Custis, who had been a classmate. A Virginian, Stuart was already a young officer of great promise, a natural horseman with a reputation for dash and bravery gained in countless clashes with Indians throughout the West, and for steady competence in the pro- and antislavery warfare of Kansas, during which he had briefly met John Brown in the process getting Brown to release a detachment of pro-slavery Missouri militiamen he had taken prisoner. Stuart, who would become a Confederate hero, a major general, and the greatest cavalry leader of the Civil War, was in civilian clothes—he was there on business, having invented and patented an improved method of attaching sabers to belts, for the use of which the War Department paid him $5,000, plus $2 for every belt hook the army bought, not a bad deal for a junior officer*—and set off immediately to Arlington. Stuart must have overheard enough to know that there was a slave insurrection taking place at Harpers Ferry, and once he reached Arlington and handed Lee the envelope, he asked permission to accompany Lee as his aide. Lee was almost as fond of Stuart as he was of his own sons (two of whom would serve under Stuart in the coming war), and agreed immediately. They set off together at once for the War Department—such was the urgency of the message that Lee did not even pause to change into uniform.

Floyd filled both officers in on what he knew—the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was already criticizing the small number of troops being sent, and hugely overestimating the number of insurrectionists—then took them over to the White House, to meet with the president. President Buchanan quickly provided Lee with a proclamation of martial law to use in case he needed it (by now rumor put the number of armed insurrectionists at 3,000), and both officers left for the station, Stuart having borrowed a uniform coat and a sword.

Horror of a slave revolt resonated sharply for Lee—slave rebellion, with the inevitable massacre of white women and children, was a fear of every white southerner, even without the prospect of northern abolitionists and freed blacks seizing possession of a Federal arsenal to arm the slaves. As a young officer, recently married, Lee had been stationed at Fort Monroe, Virginia, less than forty miles from where Nat Turner’s rebellion took place over two days in August 1831. Led by Turner, the slaves killed fifty-six whites, including women and children, using knives, hatchets, farm implements, and in the case of a young girl whom Turner himself killed, a fence post. In the wake of that rebellion, fifty-six slaves were executed and at least 200 more killed by the militia, white mobs, and vigilantes, while the state of Virginia passed laws forbidding the education of slaves and freed blacks, and requiring white ministers to be present at black church services, since the rumor was that Turner had planned his uprising in church between gospel sermons to his fellow slaves. Lee himself felt no great enthusiasm for slavery but he had heard the stories of what Nat Turner and his followers had done to their owners and the families of their neighbors from those who had seen the results with their own eyes, and so had no illusions about the consequences of a slave rebellion on a much larger scale.

Lee and Stuart took a train for the Relay House, where the spur line to Washington met the main line from Baltimore to the West, but found that the marines had already left there. The president of the Baltimore and Ohio provided them with a locomotive, and Lee telegraphed ahead to order the marines to halt at Sandy Hook, on the Maryland side of the Potomac about a mile to the east of Harpers Ferry, where Lee and Stuart caught up with them around ten o’clock on the night of October 17, after a smoky, noisy ride standing on the fire plate of the locomotive between the engineer and the fireman. By midnight, Lee, Stuart, Lieutenant Green, and the marines (accompanied by Major W. W. Russell, a marine paymaster) were in Harpers Ferry, and Lee had already appraised the situation as being less serious than was feared in Washington. Learning from the militiamen that the insurrectionists and their hostages were in the fire-engine house of the armory, he quickly telegraphed to Baltimore to halt the dispatch of further troops and artillery, ordered the marines into the armory grounds to prevent any insurrectionists from escaping, and decided to assault the fire-engine house at daylight. He would have attacked at once, but feared that the lives of some of the gentlemen . . . that were held as prisoners might be sacrificed in a night assault.

One can sense, even in Lee’s brief report after the event, the firm hand of a professional soldier taking over. With exquisite politeness, he offered the honor of forming the storming party to the commander of the Maryland Volunteers, who declined it with remarkable candor, saying, These men of mine have wives and children at home. I will not expose them to such risk. You are paid for doing this kind of work. The commander of the Virginia militia also declined the honor (referring to the marines as the mercenaries), as Lee surely guessed he would—a lesson for the future, if Lee needed one, about the value of state militias—and he therefore ordered Lieutenant Green to take those men out, which is what he probably wanted in the first place, since Green was a professional and the marines were well-trained, reliable regulars. Calmly, Lee surveyed the ground, moved the militiamen back out of the way, and sat down to write a message to the leader of the insurrectionists:

Headquarters Harpers Ferry

October 18, 1859

Colonel Lee, United States Army, commanding the troops sent by the President of the United States to suppress the insurrection at this place, demands the surrender of the persons in the armory buildings.

If they will peacefully surrender themselves and restore the pillaged property, they shall be kept in safety to await the orders of the President. Colonel Lee represents to them, in all frankness, that it is impossible for them to escape; that the armory is surrounded on all sides by troops; and that if he is compelled to take them by force he cannot answer for their safety.

The previous twenty-four hours, almost from the moment he allowed the eastbound train for Baltimore to proceed, had been a succession of disasters and tragedies for John Brown—none of which shook his self-confidence, his courage, or his command over those around him. During the night one of Brown’s followers shot and killed another citizen of Harpers Ferry, while Brown busied himself ordering an early breakfast for his men and his prisoners from the hotel across the street from the gates of the armory, apparently unaware that the Jefferson Guards from Charles Town were already on their way—Dr. Starry’s alarm that a slave uprising led by northern abolitionists was taking place in Harpers Ferry was enough to get the local militiamen moving without even bothering to put on their uniform, together with a second, hastily assembled detachment of armed and angry local citizens.

By ten in the morning gunfire could be heard throughout the town, as Brown and his followers were pinned down in the armory, and by noon the militiamen and volunteers had retaken both bridges, cutting off any chance of Brown’s escape, and were beginning to kill, one by one, those of Brown’s party who were left outside the armory. Brown’s men were spared nothing in the way of torture and desecration. One of them, a mulatto named Dangerfield Newby, who had been among those trying to hold the Potomac bridge against the militia, had his ears and his genitals cut off for souvenirs, while sharpened sticks were poked into his wounds as he died in agony. His mutilated corpse was left in the street while hogs rooted at his entrails for the rest of the day. Rather than the slave insurrection that Brown had counted on, he had unleashed mob violence instead.

John Brown was a realist in military matters, and although it was not in his nature to surrender, he soon recognized that he was surrounded by superior numbers and that no slave uprising was going to save him. By noon, the volume of fire had driven him back into the armory’s fire-engine house, a stout brick building with oak double doors, and he had already made an attempt to negotiate, proposing to release his prisoners in exchange for the right to take his men across the Potomac into Maryland, from which he no doubt hoped they could reach Pennsylvania. The two men he had sent out under a white flag were taken prisoner—the militia and the volunteers were in no mood to honor a white flag—but he soon sent out three more, with dire consequences: despite the white flag they carried, one of them was shot and wounded, and Brown’s son Watson was mortally wounded by a bullet in his guts and dragged back into the fire-engine house.

Brown set his men to work knocking out firing ports to transform the fire-engine house into a makeshift fort, and lashed the big central doors with ropes so as to leave a gap of several inches to fire through. His spirits were undaunted, and his faith in his mission as firm as ever. Even his prisoners, Colonel Washington among them, had come to admire the old man, however strongly they deplored what he was doing. By mid-afternoon, men were falling on both sides—the mayor of Harpers Ferry was shot and killed; Brown’s son Oliver, firing through the gap in the doors, was mortally wounded; two more of Brown’s men were shot as they tried to swim across the river; and one of the men Brown had sent out under a flag of truce was dragged from the hotel where he was being held to the Potomac bridge by the mob and executed—his body fell into the river and drifted to a shallow pool where people used it as an attractive target for the rest of the day. It could still be seen for a day or two lying at the bottom of the river, with his ghastly face still exhibiting his fearful death agony.

Henry A. Wise, the governor of Virginia, had attempted to reassert some kind of order in Harpers Ferry by appointing Colonel Robert W. Baylor of the militia as commander, and by nightfall Baylor had decided to offer the insurrectionist leader another chance to surrender. He sent an elderly civilian to the fire-engine house with a white handkerchief tied to his umbrella, but this courageous citizen was unable to persuade Brown to agree to an unconditional surrender, and although two more attempts were made, Brown remained defiant—he would not surrender unless he was allowed to leave with those of his men who remained alive, and the bodies of those who had been killed. These were not terms that Colonel Baylor could accept, as Brown must have known.

A final attempt was made to persuade Brown to surrender by Captain Sinn, of the Frederick militia, who hailed the fire-engine house and was invited inside by Brown. Sinn found him wearing the sword of Frederick the Great, carrying a Sharps carbine, wearing a large bowie knife on his belt, and full of complaints that his men had been shot down like dogs while bearing flags of truce. Sinn rather brusquely replied that men who took up arms against their own government must expect to be shot down like dogs. Brown took no umbrage at this, but merely replied that he had weighed the responsibility and should not shrink from it. He insisted that his followers had killed no unarmed men, but Sinn pointed out that the mayor had been unarmed when he was killed. Brown said that if so, he deeply regretted it. The two men, though opponents, clearly respected each other. Sinn crossed the street to the hotel, and returned with a surgeon to look at the wounds of Brown’s son Watson; the surgeon saw at once that the young man was dying, and that nothing more could be done but to make him as comfortable as possible.

With the departure of Captain Sinn and the surgeon, Brown’s men and his prisoners settled down for the night as best they could in the total darkness and cold of his tiny fort. Brown, with all his experience of last-ditch frontier warfare in Kansas, told his men to load all the rifles and stack them by the loopholes so they would not need to reload when the assault came; then he and Colonel Washington sat down to chat amiably enough together, and Brown reassured Washington that he would return President Washington’s sword undamaged, since this appeared to be Washington’s chief concern. From time to time Oliver Brown groaned and begged to be put out of his agony, to which his father replied first, Oh, you will get over it, then later, more sharply, If you must die, die like a man.

Many of Brown’s biographers have commented on the harshness of these remarks to his dying son, and of course to the modern ear they do sound unfeeling, but Brown’s love for his sons and grief for their loss were intense beyond any doubt—his spirit was that of the Old Testament, however, not the New, and like Abraham, his submission to God’s will was absolute and unquestioning. If the Lord demanded the sacrifice of two more of his sons to bring about the end of slavery, then so be it. It was for his boys and himself to accept God’s will with courage, as Isaac had done on Mount Moriah: hence the stern advice to Oliver to die like a man.

By eleven o’clock Oliver fell silent, and Brown said, I guess he is dead. Watson Brown’s quiet breathing indicated that he was still alive, if only just. Inside the fire-engine house, most of it taken up by two fire engines and their hoses, were the two dead or dying boys; the body of one of Brown’s followers, who had been killed while shooting through the gap between the main doors; Brown himself and five of his men, armed with Sharps rifles and revolvers; and Colonel Washington and ten other hostages. It was a small, cramped space, and cannot have been made more cheerful by the unmistakable sound of Lee’s marines replacing the militia around one in the morning, boots crashing in unison, orders being given and obeyed crisply—the arrival of regular troops could only mean that an assault was imminent.

Lee made his plans carefully. Now that the fire-engine house was surrounded by the marines, he was certain nobody could escape. He ordered Lieutenant Green to pick a party of twelve men to make the assault, plus three especially robust men to knock in the doors with sledgehammers, and a second party of twelve to go in behind them once the main door was breached, and made it clear that they would all go in with their rifles unloaded—in order to spare the hostages, the assault was to be made with bayonets; no shots were to be fired. Green did not even have a revolver—because his orders had come from the White House, he had assumed that his marines were urgently required for some ceremonial duty. They wore their dress uniforms, and he was armed merely with his officer’s dress sword, the marines’ famous Mameluke commemorating their assault on Tripoli, with its simple ivory grip and slim curved blade, an elaborate, ornamental, but flimsy weapon intended for ceremony rather than combat, instead of the pistol and heavier sword he would normally have worn on his belt going into battle. Major Russell, the paymaster, as a noncombatant officer, carried only a rattan switch, but being marines these officers were not dismayed at the prospect of assaulting the building virtually unarmed.

At first light J. E. B. Stuart was to walk up to the door and read to the leader of the insurrectionists—his name was assumed to be Isaac Smith—Lee’s letter. Whoever Smith was, Lee took it for granted that the terms of his letter would not be accepted, and he wanted the marines to get to close quarters as quickly as possible once that had happened. Speed—and the sheer concentrated violence of the assault—was the best way of ensuring that none of the hostages was harmed. The moment Smith had rejected Lee’s terms, Stuart was to raise his cap and the marines would go in.

As dawn broke Stuart advanced calmly to the doors carrying a white flag and Lee’s message. Through the gap he could see a familiar face, and the muzzle of a Sharps carbine pointed directly at his chest at a distance of a few inches—after being captured John Brown remarked that he could have wiped Stuart out like a mosquito, had he chosen to. "When Smith first came to the door, Stuart would later write, as if he had met an old friend, I recognized old Osawatomie Brown, who had given us so much trouble in Kansas."

Lee’s message made no great impression on John Brown, who continued to argue, with what Stuart called admirable tact, that he and his men should be allowed to cross the Potomac and make their way back to a free state. Stuart got along well enough with his old opponent from Kansas—except for their difference of opinion about the legitimacy of slavery, they were the same kind of man: courageous, active, bold, exceedingly polite, and dangerous—and the parley, as Stuart called it, went on for quite some time, longer almost certainly than Lee, who was standing forty feet away on a slight rise in the ground, had intended. At last Brown said firmly, No, I prefer to die here, and with something like regret, Stuart took his cap off and waved it, stepping sideways behind the stone pillar that separated the two doors of the building to make way for the marines.

There was a volley of shots from the fire-engine house as the three marines with sledgehammers stepped forward and began to batter away at the heavy oak doors. Because Brown had used rope to hold the doors slightly open, the sledgehammers made no impression at first, merely driving them back a bit as the rope stretched. Green noticed a heavy ladder nearby, and ordered his men to use it as a battering ram, driving a ragged hole low down in the right hand door at the second blow. Colonel Washington, who was inside, standing close to Brown, remarked later that John Brown was the coolest and firmest man I ever saw in defying danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm and to sell their lives as dearly as they could. This admiration for John Brown as a man was to become a common theme in the South in the next few weeks: he had all the virtues southerners professed to admire, except for his opinion of slavery.

Colonel Washington cried out loudly, Don’t mind us. Fire! as the door splintered, and Lee, who recognized Washington’s voice, exclaimed admiringly, The old revolutionary blood does tell.

Lieutenant Green was first through the narrow, splintered opening his men had created in the door. The inside of the fire-engine house was already dense with smoke—in the days before the invention of smokeless gunpowder, every shot produced a volume of thick, acrid black smoke—but despite it he at once recognized Colonel Washington, whom he knew. Washington pointed to Brown, who was kneeling beside him reloading his carbine, and said, This is Osawatomie. Green did not hesitate. He lunged forward and plunged his dress sword into Brown, but the blade struck Brown’s belt buckle and was bent almost double by the force of the blow. Green took the bent weapon in both hands and beat Brown around the head with it until the old man collapsed, blood pouring from his wounds. As the marines followed Green in, led by Major Russell with his rattan cane, one of them was shot in the face, and another killed. The rest rushed in like tigers, in Green’s words; stepped over their fallen comrades; and bayoneted two of Brown’s followers, pinning one of them against the far wall. The others surrendered, and the fight was over in three minutes. Green would later remark that a storming party is not a play-day sport, which was no doubt true enough, but Lee had achieved his objective: none of the prisoners was harmed in the assault. Colonel Washington refused to leave the fire-engine house until he was provided with a pair of gloves, since he did not want to be seen in public with dirty hands.

Lee saw to it that the captured survivors were protected and treated with kindliness and consideration. Indeed, once the fire-engine house was taken, everybody seemed impressed by John Brown, rather than infuriated or vengeful. Lieutenant Green assumed he had killed Brown, but it soon appeared that the old man’s wounds were less serious than had been thought, and Lee had him carried to the office of the paymaster of the armory, where Brown soon recovered enough strength to hold what would now be called a celebrity press conference combined with some of the attributes of a royal audience. Lee courteously offered to clear the room of visitors if their presence annoyed or pained Brown, who, though in considerable pain, replied that he was glad to make himself and his motives clearly understood, a considerable understatement given what was to come in the next six and a half weeks, during which Brown would be transformed into a national hero and martyr, largely by the skill with which he played on public opinion in the North, and by his natural dignity and courage.

The small room was crowded. Brown and one of his wounded men, both lying on some blood-soaked old bedding on the floor, were surrounded by Lee; Stuart; Governor Wise of Virginia; Brown’s former prisoner the indomitable Colonel Washington; Senator Mason of Virginia, who in the near future would become the Confederacy’s commissioner in the United Kingdom; Congressman Vallandigham of Ohio and Congressman Faulkner of Virginia, among others; and perhaps more important than all of these, two reporters, one from the New York Herald and one from the Baltimore American, with their notepads at the ready. To everybody’s surprise, Brown allowed himself to be questioned for three hours, never once losing his self-control or the respect of his audience, and giving no sign of weakness, even though Lieutenant Green’s first thrust with his sword had pierced through him almost to his kidneys before striking his belt buckle.

Governor Wise perhaps spoke for everyone when he said of Brown, He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude and simple ingenuousness. . . . He inspired me with a great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm, truthful and intelligent, unusual words to describe a man who had just stormed and captured a town and a federal arsenal, and was responsible, at least morally, for the death of four townspeople and one marine. Wise added, He is the gamest man I ever saw, a sentiment everybody seemed to share.

He was also the most eloquent. When Senator Mason asked him how he could justify his acts, Brown replied, I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity—I say it without wishing to be offensive—and it would be perfectly right in any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I do not say this insultingly. When Mason asked him if he had paid his men any wages, Brown replied, None, and when J. E. B. Stuart remarked at this, a trifle sententiously, The wages of sin is death, Brown turned to him and said reprovingly, I would not have made such a remark to you, if you had been a prisoner and wounded in my hands.

Again and again Brown trumped his opponents. When asked upon what principle he justified his acts, he replied: Upon the golden rule. I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am here; not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you and as precious in the sight of God.

Lee would later write that the ineptitude of Brown’s plan proved he was either a fanatic or a madman, and from the military point of view he was right: twelve of Brown’s eighteen men, including two of his sons, had been killed, and two (including himself) wounded. But in fact Brown’s plan had worked out triumphantly, though not in the way he had intended.

Lee ordered Lieutenant Green to deliver Brown to the Charles Town jail to await trial, but Brown was far from being a political prisoner in the modern sense; he was allowed to carry out from the very beginning an uncensored and eloquent correspondence with his admirers and his family. The initial reaction in the North was that he had given abolitionism a bad name by his violent raid, but that quickly changed to admiration—here was a man who did not just talk about ending slavery, but acted. Although his wounds obliged him to attend his trial lying on a cot and covered with blankets, Brown’s behavior during it transformed him into a hero and a martyr throughout the world except in the slave states.

Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that Brown will make the gallows glorious like the cross; Henry David Thoreau would call Brown a crucified hero; from France Victor Hugo wrote an open letter pleading for Brown’s pardon; and in Concord, Massachusetts, Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, defined the widening gulf between North and South over the issue of slavery when she wrote of Brown’s coming execution,

No monument of quarried stone

No eloquence of speech,

Can grave the lessons on the land

His martyrdom will teach.

Lee was glad to leave Harpers Ferry and return home, but after a few days there he was ordered back to organize the defense of the armory, since the growing storm of protest over Brown’s sentence had made Governor Wise fearful of a new attack on it, or of an attempt by armed abolitionists to free Brown—though Brown himself had discouraged all such attempts, convinced now that his martyrdom was part of God’s plan for the destruction of slavery. Lee, who above all things disliked emotional personal confrontations, was obliged to deal as tactfully as he could with the arrival in Harpers Ferry of Mrs. Brown, who wished to see her husband before he was executed. Mrs. Brown had come, accompanied by a few abolitionist friends, to have a last interview with her husband, as Lee wrote to his wife, explaining, As it is a matter over which I have no control I referred them to General Taliaferro. (William B. Taliaferro was the commander of the Virginia Militia at Harpers Ferry.)

The day of the execution, December 2, Lee was no more anxious to watch Brown hang than he had been to deal with Mrs. Brown, and took care to station himself with the four companies of federal troops from Fort Monroe, which had been sent by the president to guard the armory at Harpers Ferry at the request of Governor Wise. In his majestic biography of Brown, Oswald Garrison Villard—grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist and supporter of John Brown—mused, If John Brown’s prophetic sight wandered across the hills to the scene of his brief Virginia battle, it must have beheld his generous captor, Robert E. Lee, again in military charge of Harper’s Ferry, wholly unwitting that upon his shoulders was soon to rest the fate of a dozen confederated states.

But of course no such prophetic sight or spiritual glance, as Villard also imagined it, carried that far from the scaffold. The old man, who had arrived seated on his own coffin, in a wagon drawn by two horses, was as dignified and commanding a presence as ever—as he reached the scaffold, he remarked, looking at the line of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he had hoped to shelter with the slaves he had freed and armed, and from which he had intended to raid from time to time to free more until a kind of human chain reaction brought an end to slavery, This is beautiful country. I never had the pleasure of seeing it before. Erect, serene, calm, he had to wait for twelve minutes with the noose around his neck while the Virginia militia tried clumsily to form up in ranks as a square around the gallows, without showing the slightest sign of trembling in his legs or of fear on his face; the fierce eyes, which countless people who knew him compared to those of an eagle, stared unblinkingly at more than a thousand witnesses to his execution before the hood was placed on his head.

Many in the ranks around the scaffold would die in the war that was coming, some of them rising to fame and high rank, one of them at least to lasting infamy. In command of a detachment of cadet artillerymen from the Virginia Military Institute in their uniforms of gray and red was Thomas J. Jackson, professor of natural and experimental philosophy and instructor of artillery, who was praying fervently for John Brown’s soul and who in just nineteen months would receive his nickname, Stonewall, at First Manassas—First Bull Run, in the North—and would go on to become Lee’s most trusted corps commander and lieutenant. Also among the troops drawn up to prevent Brown’s being rescued were Edmund Ruffin, a white-haired firebrand secessionist who was determined to see Brown die, had purchased some of the blades from John Brown’s pikes in order to send one to the governor of each slave state as a reminder of Yankee hatred of the South, and would fire the first shot on Fort Sumter; and, in the Richmond company of the Virginia militia, a private of dramatic appearance, eyes fixed on the figure on the scaffold and delighted to be part of a historic scene: the actor John Wilkes Booth, who in five years would become Lincoln’s assassin, and would himself have stood on a scaffold like Brown’s had he not been shot by a Union soldier.

In Philadelphia a public prayer meeting was held at just the moment Brown dropped through the trap to hang between heaven and earth. In Albany, New York, a slow hundred-gun salute was fired, to honor the martyr. In Cleveland, Ohio, Melodeon Hall was draped in mourning for a meeting attended by fourteen hundred persons. In New York City and in Rochester and Syracuse, New York, huge prayer meetings were held—as they were in Concord, Plymouth, and New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Concord and Manchester, New Hampshire. All over the North bells were tolled mournfully at the moment of Brown’s death, and in Boston churches, halls, and temples were filled with mourners—in Tremont Hall, a packed meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society heard the abolitionist and pacifist William Lloyd Garrison declare: I am prepared to say: ‘Success to every slave insurrection at the South, and in every slave country.’ And I do not see how I compromise or stain my peace profession in making that declaration. . . . Give me, as a non-resistant, Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord, rather than the cowardice and servility of a Southern slave-plantation.

Once it was north of the Mason-Dixon Line the train carrying Brown’s body—transferred to a new coffin that was not of southern origin or manufacture—was halted by huge crowds at every station along the way, until he was at last laid to rest before a giant boulder at his home in New Elba, New York, in the shadow of Whiteface Mountain.

Showers of meteors had marked Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, his trial, and his execution, prompting Walt Whitman, in a poem about Brown, to ask himself, What am I myself but one of your meteors? Thoreau too, described Brown’s life as meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live, and Herman Melville, in The Portent, described Brown prophetically as the meteor of the war. It was Melville’s phrase that stuck, appropriately, since it would be only seventeen months between John Brown’s execution and the firing on Fort Sumter that brought about the war.

Whatever else Brown had done, the reaction to his death effectively severed the country into two opposing parts, making it clear to the South, even to moderates there who were searching for a compromise, that northerners’ tolerance for slavery was wearing thin. Until Brown’s death, the issues had been whether or not slavery would be extended into the territories, and the degree to which escaped slaves in the free states could be seized as property and returned to their owners. Now Brown had made the very existence of slavery as an institution an issue—in fact the issue.

Southerners were dismayed and angered by the enormous outpouring of sympathy and grief in the northern states for a man who had been convicted of treason, rebellion, first-degree murder, and conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel, while northerners were outraged by the speed with which the Virginia jury had decided Brown’s fate—forty-five minutes—in view of the seriousness of the charges against him, and by his execution, when many felt that a pardon or imprisonment would have been more appropriate. Marvellous old man! the eloquent abolitionist Wendell Phillips declaimed in a magnificent funeral oration that rivals the Gettysburg Address in simplicity and passion as one of the noblest statements of American history. He has abolished slavery in Virginia. . . . True the slave is still there. So when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months—a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes—it does not live—hereafter.

This was exactly what people throughout the South feared. Assigned temporarily to command the Department of Texas, Lee returned there in February 1860 to resume his pursuit of Mexican bandits and Comanche bands on the frontier. He did not dwell on his face-to-face meeting with John Brown, or on his own role in one of the most striking dramas in American history, but one senses in his correspondence with friends and family a growing alarm, intensified by his experiences at Harpers Ferry, at the speed with which the Union appeared to be unraveling. He was as little pleased with the extravagant demands of what he called, with the natural distaste of a Virginia aristocrat for the noisy and violent nouveaux riches of the great cotton plantations, the ‘Cotton States,’ as they term themselves, as with the strident hostility of the abolitionists toward the South. He was appalled at southerners’ talk about the renewal of the slave trade, to which he was opposed on every ground, and his experience of dealing with his father-in-law’s slaves